I'm Bart Pascoal, An Ex-Mormon Who Loves Jesus

right now Bart's goingon to tell his story what there all right on water like a little so yeah I was I was Mormon all my life I grew up in it until about 40 years old I went on LDS mission and everything where Argentina salt Argentina wow did that in the 90 early '90s and so yeah I I came back I did the temple marriage I had my family I did lots of callings Elders cor president Sunday Sunday school president Sunday school teacher a lot of times they just had me as a Sunday school teacher and I uh I was CU I used to travel a lot so I could never do a calling that had stuff that I had to do during the week so I usually picked up stuff on the weekends but uh I at one point my wife and I were looking to like be more spiritually driven and stuff and we were studying the scriptures together a lot and I was really worried about how I could be forgiven of my sins and so I was reading a lot of materials like I was reading everything I could and I was reading the book of Mormon and and the Bible and the Miracle of forgiveness by Spencer W Kimble and I'm to go back like when when we were studying together my wife and I we we just said hey let's just read the Bible together so we were reading in the New Testament and we started in Matthew and I remember we were reading through in Matthew and one of the first passages that we came to that made us first start questioning our faith was uh Matthew 22 and I can't remember the verse exactly but the Pharisees come to to Jesus and they say hey a woman marries a man and then that man dies and so she marries the brother and then he dies and until she marries seven husbands and then they all die and the Pharisees asks who will she be with in the afterlife and Jesus said you he in understanding the scriptures and this is just me paraphrasing but he's like you Heir there is no Mar nether never given it or received a marriage and my wife and I were like what that doesn't make any sense what about eternal marriage and so we're just like okay that's one to write down to ask the bishop about you know and uh and we would just keep reading and studying and stuff and uh and I and then we started to get into the gospels and we started to hear um about the grace and the Forgiveness of sins through you know through faith and and I was contrasting that with the Book of Mormon in 2 Nephi 25:23 says we are saved by grace after all we can do and I'm like after all I can do well how much is all I can do and so I remember getting on the internet I got on Google I'm like I tried all the rules of Mormonism you know so I was like I'm going to find out what everything was that I needed to do and so I like typed that in nothing I couldn't find any website that had all the rules of Mormonism and so I just started I thought well I'll just make a list you know you got you got the Ten Commandments and I can just start with with that so I just started with the the 10 mammoths and I started reading through everything I could find I read the book of Mormon I read the doctrine of covenants Pro G price I read like every conference issue of the Inon that I could get my hands on or read I was just like pouring through it and this is you know hundreds of hours of reading and I was just taking and writing down every rule that I could find that that the prophets were giving us through Mormonism and uh so I recorded them all on a big Excel sprad sheet and I was just keeping it all down and eventually I I stopped at 613 and that's number meant a lot to me because uh in jesus' time the Pharisees and them they had 613 rules surrounding uh the law that um is that the Jews had to obey and so I was just thinking you could could have kept going I probably could have kept going yeah but I stopped at 613 and I was just thinking this is like like Mormon Pharisees and this is all done like over bridging other parts of my story where I where I finally actually resigned for Mormonism so by the time I finished the list I had already resigned and uh and so I posted that list online after all weand do.com and it's just all the rules and then there's a link so you can go to the lds.org or wherever and see the rule and uh it's it's very powerful so if you go there it's just like the list just keeps going you're scrolling with your mouse and it just never ends and this is one thing after another and so for me you know I was just reading in in the Bible and finding that that that's not how it works because this is an impossible gospel for someone to to do all they can do we we are saved by grace after all we can do and that's not the only passage that backs that up I I was reading in the Articles of Faith The Third Article Faith clearly says we are saved by obedience and so obedience to what obedience to laws and ordinances of the gospel and so what are the laws 613 rules I found them all you know so there was there was nowhere for me to go there wasn't anything I could do I couldn't even memorize the list sorry how would I know if I was even obeying all the rules if I couldn't remember 613 of them all at the same time so that's that's how I came to know I'm forgetting something though I I do remember a particular moment where that all that led me to to believe in the grace of Jesus Christ but I continued to attend I remember I continued to attend Mormon church for a while a few weeks after I came to the realization that all I needed was Jesus I thought I can just be for Jesus and still go to Mormon church and just kind of not disrupt everything and so I was in Elders corm one time and I remember they were teaching on Perfection that was the topic and how we can be perfect not all at once but one thing at a time so pick one thing today you can be perfect about tithing or whatever and then once you get that perfect perfected till you're doing it perfectly then you move on to the next thing and I was just thinking just that's ridiculous I'm never going to be able to be perfect on by my own actions that was that and even if you itemize it yeah and and I I didn't even bother raising my hand and I was just sitting there on 's corn just shaking my head I was like this is ridiculous I cannot let my kids come here and hear this crap so I just said fine I'm just going to not do this anymore but I can't remember if that was before or after when there was a point in my uh story where or my in all of this history in the history yeah there was a point where it was like a switch went off in my head where I knew that that the Mormon faith was was not correct and that was at one point when I was reading in the miracle of forgiveness I was reading Spencer W Kimble and he said that the um the repentance that merits forgiveness and I can't remember the next phrase but that that part the repentance that merits forgiveness uh requires something like you have to totally remove the desire to Sines yeah so and I was like I urge I have urges all the time and I give into them sometimes and and there's no way I can say from this day forth I'm not going to to sin anymore and it got so bad for me um years before this before my spiritual Revival where I was trying to get back in with my wife and stuff but there I went through a dark patch where because of my sin and because I would try to repent every day you know I was like i' kneel down dear God please forgive me I did X Y and Z and in Mormonism you have to promise to never do it again because you're that's part of the the repentance process so I promise God that I wasn't going to do such and such and then the next day what would I do right so says I do the things that I don't want to do and the things I don't want to do I do that was you yeah exactly so so then would do it and then I would try to kneel down and I'd be like who am I kidding I am Li I am lying to God I and so then I was just like I can't even Bo I can't even do this I can't kneel down and pray to God and lie to him because he knows I'm lying promise you'll never do it again yeah cuz I'm like and so then it just got to the point where I didn't even bother talking to God at all CU I was like if there's no point why would I do this to lie to God and so I just God to the point where I I was like well there's no way I can make it to the social Kingdom so I was in for a penny and for a pound kind of deal so I just didn't even care at some point that was probably when I was like 35 36 is so that was a few years before even I started come out of that and but so so back to my Exodus from Mormonism that was that one point where I was reading in the Miracle of forgiveness and I read that passage and I just knew like inside myself or whatever I knew that what I had just read was was not only that was it wrong but it was a lie so for us for me to be able to be forgiven I of my sins this the repentance that merits forgiveness would be to remove the even the desire to sin right so I just knew that that was a lie and I and so then instantly like a switch went off of my head and I was like like oh well if that's a lie then Spencer W Kimble is lying and he's not a prophet or he or he thinks he is or he's pretending or something but he's absolutely not speaking for God and so then I was able to kind of go well if that's the case what about all the other prophets before him and once I was able to kind of look at Spencer W Kimble that way cuz I when I I was younger I grew up with I was going to say you grew up with Spencer W Kimble is Prophet so did I we're the same age and so it was like he was a big deal when we were growing up all through probably early maybe 10 or 11 or earlier than he was your he was your prophet he was one of the main prophets for me so I once I I once I was able to kind of look at him and go he's lying about this or he doesn't have any clue either way he's not a prophet because a prophet shouldn't be able to say to tell me something about how to be forgiven that's absolutely not true so once that happened I was able to kind of look at the other prophets before him from an angle of what their real motivations were or whether they had any sort of inspiration or whether they knew anything and all of a sudden I could just see Joseph Smith as a sex addicted Flander you know cuz he had 34 wives and and that and that's a whole another story with my my story cuz you know I always knew that there was the polygamy and that Joseph Smith had wives I don't think I knew that it was 34 but I knew he had lots of wives and I remember at one point when I was after I had just decided I was done with Mormonism I went to my kids I have teenagers and I asked them do you guys know what yeah this is my son me he was one of them I asked I said hey do you guys know what polygamy is and they said no what's that what's polygamy I had no idea so I'm a father and I know this about the religion I know that Joseph Smith has polygamy right but I keep that a secret or whatever I mean how embarrassing is that to think now I'm talking to my kid honestly about it and just going in shame I'm in shame cuz I'm like didn't tell my kid even my own kids about about this and um so I'm like do you know what polygamy is no what's that and I'm like well you know when a when a man takes more than one wife and Anthony says Oh you mean like Osama Bin Laden seriously you know the kids that's just what they say right so I'm like okay yeah exactly like that ama bin L has all these wives and uh and they knew that Osama bin London had Six Wives so I asked well how many wives do you think Joseph had and they I can't remember they guessed probably around the same and I said and I told him how many 34 pretty sure I just said one that's all I knew but you you made me question I was like one I think yeah that question was like we went over to the computer and we just looked it up on family search.org sure I just went this is the Church website yeah here's the Church website here you go here's the list and I think the one that we had found listed like 20 something wives they didn't have all 34 but still 20 that's past Glutton that's just yeah mother mother daughter par it's to be gross younger GS and poly injuries yeah cuz you married two 14-year-old girls yeah so um can I ask you about your wife yes what about your wife well we were I I know I didn't include that in this I was telling my story I don't want to speak for her but we we read the Bible together right I think I mentioned that earlier so in Matthew 22 we read that about the eternal life and or Eternal Marriage and so that was that was one question and then later we were reading and I remember one thing that we noted together was that because we were just reading the New Testament and and I remember I went to the bishop and and I was like cuz he was kind of giving us stuff to read and and I was like Bishop we're going to read the New Testament but we don't have enough time to do the 30 minutes of the Book of Mormon to because of the recommendation for the Mormons to read 30 minutes the Book of Mormon every day and so we were just like we're just going to read the Bible only because so that's what we decided to do was just read the Bible only so we were only reading that Bish's like wait no no he he was okay with it it's good and and uh or maybe it was even his idea I can't remember that's great and so where was I we were reading the book of Mark we were reading the New Testament and all the stuff that we were seeing Jesus do I was putting it together he was very like sarcastic he was very uh bold he was like in the temple with the whip and he's going and so this was like a totally different Jesus than I had grown up with that I had always kind of seen the the Mormon feeble like effeminate you know I don't know if that's offensive but it's just like yeah and he's just so like Sullen and meek to Beyond Meek into some sort of like might I say boring yeah very boring yeah yeah that's a good way to put it so the Jesus I was reading about in the New Testament he was kind of cool you know I was like I could this is like awesome the Pharisees try to trick him and he's like slips out of it and he's like awesome all the time and I'm like riding in the dirt yeah he's pretty cool so that was that was another thing so we had the Eternal Marriage and then we had hey this Jesus is pretty cool guy a whole lot more interesting he's yeah more character and then um Grace yeah the grace yeah and I remember um yeah so we were kind of all on board with with Grace and with Jesus and stuff before we even left Mormonism so we and I I can't really remember it might have been a month before we left but once we decided we were going to be out we were you know active Mormons going to church every Sunday and all that up until the point where we finally made the decision um in October of 2011 wow so we were like okay we're going to do this so we just resigned while we were still active members in the church just wrote Our resignation letters I felt kind of bad for the bishop because the week that we decided to resign they had just called a new bishop he was a young guy he had never been a bishop before and so then I was like okay baptism by fire here you go it was his first Sunday as bishop and someone's is like great I'm already doing that yeah he was not very happy so I kind of felt bad for him but so all your kids what are what were their ages and have they left with you cuz I know a lot of times when a family leaves the kids are very rebellious and they get sucked back in so so what my wife and I decided to do with the kids was we just didn't even know how to talk to our kids because we we never talk to them about honestly about the church anyways we didn't tell them about polygamy we so we didn't even know yeah we didn't know what to say to them so it was very difficult and I don't where I got the idea but I decided there was in 2007 PBS did a a documentary on the Mormons it's a 4our documentary and it's kind of lightweight it's got some stuff it just touches on racism it touches a little bit on polygamy but I remember when when it came out in 2007 my wife and I were all excited hey the PBS Mormon show so we we only made it like 25 minutes into the show before we were Disturbed enough that we turned it off I remember that and then our home teacher came because you felt they were representing Mormonism wrong I don't remember but we were very uncomfortable so we turned it off and I remember the home teacher came by later and he was all he loved it he was excited about it and he was talking about it with us and then my wife was very disturbed by that and she was like I don't want him to come and be our home teacher anymore and and so I was like I had to tell him look just come by with the first presidency message you know don't talk about don't talk about the Mormon's thing and and so that got me sidetracked a little bit what was I talking about watch oh the kids the kids got me so you sat them all down and had them watch it we were going to have family home evening so we have family home evening M family homeing no we've done lots of family activities but we don't call it family home evening but anyways we sit down and like we're going to watch a movie for family home evening so we watched the PBS Mormons and I hadn't I hadn't watched it since then so we were watching it all for the first time except for the first half hour right do we need to turn the light on in here it just got dark for some reason oh I can turn it on yeah so we sat the the kids down we're like we're going to have family home evening and I think we watched it over two weeks or three I can't remember how we yeah so we tried it was a lot to do cuz we watched two 2 hours and then we watched 2 hours but so it was a 4 hour special or something like that yeah so we played the movie and every time there was something disturbing or whatever the kids would look at us like with this face of hey tell us that what we're seeing here is it's a lie it's a lie and it's not fix this for us yeah fix save me from this disturbing thing because they were talking about the racism in the Book of Mormon and stuff and how the blacks couldn't have the priesthood before and you know how that works and I remember uh Anthony looking at looking at me to save him and from that and I was like that's what it is and I didn't save him from it I was like I was like what the heck are you the oldest no my oldest is 18 years old he's 15 but my oldest is special needs so he's more like a little brother for for Anthony kind of yeah and then we have one that's a lot younger six years old and they're all boys so and uh so you have three kids three kids yeah okay so so yeah so the kids looked us like hey save us we're watching this you know this is very disturbing and the polygamy and all that stuff and and we just kind of let it set with them CU we didn't know how to talk to them about this stuff so we just let them mle it over for a while until later we would come back and talk to them what did you guys think about that show the PBS Mormons and they would have questions is was that really true and I said well I looked I did the research on it it and I looked it up and yeah as a matter of fact there's more to it would you like to know this and so we talked yeah and by the time we decided as a family to leave Mormonism and then as a family we decided what we were going to do next cuz we were like well are we going to go to a church and I was like I don't know we'll we'll try a church and then we'll just all see if we like it so we went to it you and Mom went do CH we yeah my my wife and I went and we scoped one out it's a good idea yeah that mean you don't want to expose the kids in yeah but you don't want to expose them to other false teachings you're like let's just go slow well first of all I was like I definitely don't want to go to a church where there's going to be some 80-year-old man in another state that's going to tell this tell the congregation what to believe like a prophet from in Utah or like so I didn't I was very against going to any denomination like I didn't want him to go to something that had like a like an actual denomination on it like Presbyterian or Lutheran or whatever and that was because I was very anti-establishment religiously and because because that's what I came from with Mormonism I was like definitely not so we we picked the Community Church to go to and we scoped it out and then we brought the kids and we said hey Mom and Dad we checked this place out and we thought it was pretty cool you guys want to to come and see and then so we just went and then when we got home we talked about it did you guys like it and they were like they love the music cuz they played contemporary music and they were like yeah the music was awesome you know they got guitars and drums and and so the kids were excited about the music and I was excited about the music and and CU explain explain the mor music well to contrast what we came from it's just a funeral March every Sunday you know it's like and all organ or piano and very boring it says at the top upbeat and it's the same yeah it's always 50 instead of 75 yeah just no matter what you're trying to sing it fast and the organist is going slow there's nothing to be done about it can you talk a little bit about your infographics and what get you into that and some of your best your favorite ones okay so it's like almost all right well we'll be okay we'll maybe we'll have to do that tomorrow dang no cuz they don't have it on we we'll do come home then all right so what were we what are we asking me Graphics okay so um I already talked about the list the 613 rules so I created that list and then I decided Well I might since I couldn't find the list on Google I might as well just post it on a website and let other people find it so I got the domain after all we can Doom and I just basically converted the Excel sheet into a HTML page and just posted it and that I let that sit for a while and then were you getting hits was it yeah it was it still gets hits you know people find it they're looking for rules and they find it um but I never set out to make like you know I've got the Mormon infographics website with all those pictures and stuff but I never set out to make a website about that one day Warren Jeffs was in the news and I was just curious like what is the difference between Warren Jeffs and Joseph Smith really and so I got and I did some research on Warren Jeffs and then I did some re research on Joseph Smith and I compared you know statistics data between the two like how many wives they had how many were underage how many of the wives were sisters how many were mother daughter pairs stuff like that and it was just a chart just a simple chart with you know Joseph Smith this mini or Jeffs this mini it was just factual yeah it's very factual there was a few things I called out like hey this is adultery or this you know the sisters there was a passage I called out from Leviticus that says that it was I don't remember what it Leviticus says about it but it condemns it and then I just posted that not on a website I just kind of posted on Facebook and a couple other places and then I got a lot of positive feedback from it and I was like I was like okay that's pretty cool so whenever like a topic interested me or people would talk about it as I was cuz I didn't know about a lot of the problems with Mormonism because I came out by reading through the Bible and stuff and and but then once I was out it was okay to like do some research and I was finding out more about Joseph Smith like not just that he had 34 wives but that those wives were some of them were sisters some of them were motherdaughter pairs some of them were already married to other women so that would be adultery other husbands sorry sorry other husbands cuz that would be adultery and some of them were kids so those are like details that I didn't know about so I would just throw do research on my own on topics I was interested in and just put them together in a way that I could understand it better and then I would just post it and it wasn't until like I had like six like six infographics all posted in all different places and people would put you know email me where's the picture of whatever how can I find this I can't find it anywhere and I was like kind of dragged Kicking and Screaming to making a website for it because I was like okay well that sounds like I need to pull a URL and just post them all on the same page and so by the time I did that I did Mormon infographics docomo and now I've been updating them regularly so the most popular infographic that I have on that website is the W the mini wives of Joseph Smith so it's just it looks like kind of a pedigree chart it's got Joseph Smith at the top and then it's got all the wives listed and they're all categorized so it's very easy to understand cuz it's so complicated with all the relationships and everything that there's no way to you can you can print out a list and look at it and it's not very impactful but when you see it visually it really means a lot but so I've got like 30 Graphics some of them are really popular and some of them not but they're all ones that I was interested in so it's mostly what I do it just topics that I that I'm interested in I research and I just posted the information but it's gotten a good positive um following I I know for a fact it's helped people come out of the Mormon faith and uh you know because later people will talk to me and they'll say oh well when I was doing research I found your infographics and it really helped me I was looking at it but that nobody's ever said hey this thing right here is the was the straw that broke the camel's back no they it's just something that that they found along the way and I'm happy to to have that there as a resource for them it's cool man it's a cool story

Channel: Aaron Shafovaloff

Views: 17,797

Keywords: mormon, infographics, ex-mormon, jesus, testimony, after all we can do

Id: 4qGVqiJVa_E

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2013